Volume 3, Number 11 · January 14, 1965
How the Schools Fail
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
How Children Fail
by John Holt
Pitman, 181 pp., $4.50
The Student and his Studies
by Esther Raushenbush
Wesleyan, 204 pp., $5.00
These two books complement each other superbly. Both undertake to show how students use schooling to release and develop their particular talent and capacity; and with the ways in which they so often fail. Mr. Holt and Mrs. Raushenbush write about education as a process that may either nurture or stultify human development, and both describe in detail just what occurs in the student in response to the demands the school makes, and the opportunities it affords. What distinguishes their work from nearly everything else that has recently been written about American education is the meticulous attention and respect they accord to the experience of the particular youngsters they discuss. The unsentimental devotion to education that leads them to describe the students they have observed as persons, rather than as cases, augments the sharp contrasts within the picture they present: failures become more painful to observe, triumphs more satisfying.
Review, 2521 words
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